Lightning Times

Homelands

The enemy's will is strong because his identity is strong. And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own.
- Natan Sharansky, 'Defending Identity'

The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.
- Mohammed Akram, 'An Explanatory Memorandum'

I.
Who are you?
What is your name?
What's the place you call home? And if you were taken from your home by force, how would you stay true to who you are?

The Israeli television series 'Hatufim' - adapted for American TV as 'Homeland' - tells the story of two Israeli POWs who return home after 17 years in captivity at the hands of a terrorist group. Throughout the series, Nimrod and Uri struggle with questions of loyalty and identity; over and over, both of them tell the women in their lives "I'm not the same man I was before."

The first episodes show Nimrod and Uri being taken to a "facility" for debriefing, where they're questioned intensively by the relentless Major Haim Cohen. Cohen wants to learn all he can about the enemy, of course, but he also wants to know whether the two men have given up information to their captors.

As the show progresses, we begin to wonder how much - and on what levels - they have been altered by their time with the enemy. Early in the second season, a psychologist is shown giving a lecture (for our benefit) on "Stockholm syndrome". Later, another soldier returns home from a deep-cover mission, having ostensibly converted to Islam and taken the name Yusuf to work with the Children of Jihad - but hearing the muezzin's call for the first time since returning to Israel, and standing in his own childhood home, he begins reciting the Muslim prayers. And late at night, he is still haunted by the guard's repeated question, "What is your name?"

One real-life prisoner who stayed loyal to his cause was Natan Sharansky. His valuable book Defending Identity recounts his experiences in prison, and the lessons he drew from those times. Despite being held by the Communists for nine years in a Soviet prison, Sharansky (then known by his Russian name, Anatoly Shcharansky) did not back down from advocating human rights and Jewish solidarity.

But are not these two things - universal rights and ethnic solidarity - in conflict with one another? Sharansky insists that they are not, and in fact believes that this truth is the secret of his strength. From his own experience, and from observing others in the gulag, he concludes that "those with the strongest identities were the least likely to succumb to tyranny" (p. 61). And very often, this identity is found in religion. Sharansky does not claim it can be found only there, but it's clear that he sees faith as a source of strength with few rivals.

Religion - Jewish religion, that is - is notably absent from 'Hatufim'. The Jews of 'Hatufim' are secular Israelis who go to the synagogue only for bar mitzvahs. It's unlikely that they are fastidious about observing the Sabbath or the kosher laws (although it's hard to tell on this latter point, as all the characters are vegetarian). The Bible is quoted only once - in a reference to the Mossad's motto, Proverbs 24:6.

Contrast this with the devotion to purpose the Children of Jihad (the fictional terrorist group), whose members pray regularly, listen to Koranic sermons, and are often found at the mosque. In a battle of wills - if we accept Sharansky's premise - which side is better armed?

II.
Jihad is closer than we like to think.

On July 29, 1983, a guy named Stephen Paul Paster tried to blow up what was then the Hotel Rajneesh on SW 11th Avenue and Main Street in Portland, Oregon. The bomb exploded prematurely, damaging the building and injuring him; he escaped and the law caught up with him two years later. He was sentenced to 20 years, of which he served four, getting released early for good behavior. He immediately took off for Pakistan, where he's believed to be living to this day.

Paster was a member of Jamaat al-Fuqra, a jihadi organization founded by Sheikh Gilani and believed to be a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The incident was soon forgotten, and the Rajneeshees, for their part, staged a bioterror attack of their own the following year and eventually dropped off the radar.

Jamaat al-Fuqra dropped off the radar, too, but they haven't gone away. Back in 1993, after the first World Trade Center bombing, the Anti-Defamation League published (pdf) a report on Al-Fuqra listing known and suspected incidents involving al-Fuqra through that date. The India-based South Asia Terrorism Portal has an article on Jamaat al-Fuqra also:

One of the persons convicted in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was Clement Rodney Hampton-el, a Fuqra member. JF was linked in a Congressional testimony to the planning of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Gilani is now in Pakistani custody for the abduction of US journalist Daniel Pearl. Official sources in Pakistan have indicated that Daniel Pearl was attempting to meet Gilani in the days before he disappeared in Karachi. Pakistani police arrested Gilani in Rawalpindi on January 30, 2002 and shifted him to Karachi for questioning. Although he denied any link to the abduction, police also detained several of his colleagues. Consequent to his arrest, he reportedly told his interrogators that he had links with the Pakistani intelligence agencies.

A media report has indicated that the JF is also being probed for links with Richard Reid, a Briton, accused of trying to use explosives in his shoes to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner on December 22, 2001. ...

Three suspected US-based JF members have been arrested on weapons charges in the year 2001, including two following the September 11 multiple terrorist attacks. Vicente Rafael Pierre, a 44-year-old native of Brooklyn and his wife Traci Upshur, both JF cadres, were arrested on gun charges and convicted on November 30, 2001. Pierre's Virginia compound, near the Red House Commune, is reported to have served as a JF base.

Islamberg, New York was founded by Gilani in the 1980s. Martin Mawyer's Christian Action Network alleges that Islamberg is part of a network of settlements built for the purpose of training jihadi fighters. Mawyer details these allegations in his book Twilight in America, which has brought him a lawsuit from Gilani; Mawyer says bring it on.

Jamaat al-Fuqra think long-term, like their parent organization the Muslim Brotherhood. That's one of the hallmarks of the MB - they're disciplined, dedicated, and very patient. Their goals are set forth in a document, authored by Mohammed Akram and dated 1991, which became public during the Holy Land Foundation trials. If you haven't read the Explanatory Memorandum (pdf) yet, go take a look (English translation starts on page 16). You can also order a printed edition of the translation.

Akram, a member of the Brotherhood's board of directors and a senior member of Hamas, describes the process of Islamic "settlement" in North America as a "civilization-jihadist process". This process is projected to happen in five phases: settlement, establishment, stability, enablement, and rooting. It's not just a plan to address the needs of Muslims living in North America, or to improve Islamic education. Here's what it's really all about:

The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes ...

You might wonder if the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan il-Muslimun in Arabic) is banned in the US as a terrorist organization. It's hard to say; might be tricky, since Ikwhanul Muslimun in Hancock, New York is a registered tax-exempt charity. Martin Mawyer's book says (p. 137) that

if you type the words 'Ikhwanul Muslimun' into the IRS web site in search of charities, you will learn that Ikhwanul Muslimun, Inc. is a tax-exempt organization filing as a church, and located on a 70-acre terrorist training camp in Hancock, New York— the same camp owned by Muslims of the Americas. It was registered with the IRS in 1974, yet, when contacted, the IRS claims to have no supporting or founding documents for the group. They know nothing more about them other than to confirm that they pay no taxes.

III.
Michael Totten has traveled all over the world and he's spent a lot of time in the Middle East. He's published books about Iraq, Lebanon, and the former Communist world. But his first novel - a story about a kidnapping - is set in the United States, in the Pacific Northwest.

In 'Taken', Michael Totten (the author as character) is abducted from his home in Portland and held hostage by American jihadists. The premise is chilling and entirely plausible.

Ahmed, Michael's interlocutor for much of the story, presents an articulate and reasonable-seeming face. Calmly and confidently, he outlines what he sees as the inevitable victory of Islam. Ahmed claims that he does not want to convert America "at gunpoint" (p. 67), and insists that "there is no compulsion in religion."

"The Jews don't like converts," Ahmed asserts. (That hasn't been my experience.) Ahmed, himself from a secular Muslim family background, sees the advance of Islam as inevitable. For him it's a choice between dynamism and stagnation, between meaning and emptiness, between something and nothing.

One of the most disturbing passages in 'Taken' comes near the end, where Totten, as narrator, describes his feelings of attraction toward Islam after feigning an interest in conversion to please his captors.

Does the narrator begin to succumb to Stockholm syndrome? Despite explicitly denying it, despite giving a knowledgeable discussion of the subject, is Totten's narrator in fact slipping into Stockholm syndrome himself towards the end of the story? I'll let you read the book and decide for yourself.

In Hatufim (Season 2, episode 4), the professor explains the process of Stockholm syndrome, citing the importance of creating a total dependency within the prisoner. She enumerates three essential conditions for this dependency: the prisoner's certainty that his life or death rests within the captor's hands; absolute isolation and deprivation of knowledge about the outside world, except for what the captor tells him; and finally, arbitrary kindness, which renders the prisoner defenseless and makes his identification with the captor "complete and absolute".

Totten brings out another aspect of the process, though, which I think is especially interesting. "I realized I was changing," the narrator admits (p. 109). "I was building invisible chains for myself." He realizes that even without being physically chained, "my own mind would create invisible walls for myself."

If the jihadis succeed in creating an atmosphere of intimidation, they will prevail. The Muslim Brotherhood will not need to resort to spectacular, mass-casualty attacks like al-Qaeda's destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; instead, by incrementally circumscribing the actions of free people into an ever-tighter sphere, they will achieve their goals with scarcely any resistance at all. We will have built our own invisible walls, and tied ourselves in our own invisible chains.

IV.
If you walk up to Jaffa from Tel Aviv, you'll pass an old, gutted brick building - once a soap factory - with its arches covered, jail-like, by iron bars. If you stand still in the afternoon heat and listen, you can hear the rustling and squeaking. It's full of bats.

I'm thinking about that building this afternoon.

On a day like today I can look out at San Francisco and think it'll last forever. The sky is clear, and it's warm outside - 80 degrees, and it's not even September yet! From the air-conditioned office where I work, the buildings of the Financial District appear immaculate, geometric, impregnable. In a century or two, will there be bats in these buildings? Will they be fit to live in, or even still be standing?

I have lived a pretty sheltered life. I haven't seen death up close, except once or twice. One night in a desert far away from my home, four of my buddies lost their lives to one of our own missiles outside of Khafji. The blast had obliterated their vehicle and there wasn't anything left to bury; we just held a short memorial service in the cool, damp January air and moved on. I could easily have been one of them. That was the night before my 28th birthday.

A year and a half later, my sister - who had just turned twenty-eight - was lying on a stainless steel table in the coroner's office. She looked so much smaller than she had in life, and healthier - like a child. Her face looked peaceful; her body, wrapped in the sheet, made me think of a cocoon or a chrysalis. Perhaps her soul had broken free like a butterfly; if so it flew in a hidden dimension of space where I could not see it.

She was a poet, and what she left us was her memories and her words. Every one of us will have to leave some day, and we will all leave something behind. What we build, and what we leave for others, exists in that invisible space, in that untouchable dimension. And that's what we're fighting for.

I think of my teenage son and my little girl. What kind of world will they live in? What words will they have? Will they write poetry? Will they know Hebrew? Will they light Sabbath candles with their children?

"A man with no children has no home," says Yusuf's Muslim mother-in-law when she's begun to suspect that his loyalties still lie with the other side.

Our true homes have their foundations deep in the invisible inner space of our minds and souls, but they become part of the larger world in the children we leave behind.

More than the physical space of our cities, it's our mental and spiritual space that we're fighting for. Will we be as defenseless as the villagers in Totten's dream image? When we are asked 'What is your name?' will we know how to answer?

The Second Conversation

I've re-posted my piece The Second Conversation, which was originally published on August 19 in the now-defunct Media Tapper. Events since then - the Benghazi consulate attack and the attacks on Buddhists in Bangladesh - only further illustrate how eagerly Muslim extremists will seize on some perceived (or imagined), purely symbolic "insult" to excuse their own acts of violence. This must not be rewarded or tolerated.

The Long Road Home

The Long Road Home
Asher Abrams, 1st LAI Battalion USMC, 1989-1993
Posted to the unit veterans’ bulletin board.

“That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall; for there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly in vain.”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ I:2

“It is not your job to finish the task -- but neither are you free to abandon it.”
-- Rabbi Tarfon, 1st century

We gave what our leaders asked of us. If they had asked more, we would have given more.

Before the ground campaign began, we were told that the American forces’ final objective would be Baghdad, and that we would eliminate Saddam Hussein. As we all know, this did not happen. “The word was passed; the word was changed.” But we did liberate Kuwait.

All of us need to know that what we are doing has meaning and purpose. This is especially true in war. War is a hard thing -- having a reason gives us the motivation and the will to fight. Sgt. Michaels talks about this in his book (pp. 97-100): “It’s about my comrade, and his tiny Kuwaiti flag...” I don’t think this is naive. I think it is honest, truthful, and inspiring.

Nothing we do will ever be complete or perfect. If you’ve read ‘The Lord of the Rings’, or seen the movie, you might have noticed that theme. It’s not a story of superheroes, but of little people who are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. They don’t set out to do great things; they love their home and dream of returning to it. They confront evil in a world that gives them no choice. Only then do they discover what they are truly capable of. Their victory comes with the loss of teachers, leaders, friends, and innocence. But they win, and some come back alive. It falls to them to tell the tale.

One of Dave Snyder’s favorite sayings was, “This isn’t fun anymore. I want to go home!” What made it funny, of course, was that in the military you can’t go home when you want, and a lot of what you do isn’t fun. But in the end Dave got his wish -- he went home before the rest of us.

Those of us who returned alive from Desert Storm have done many things with our lives. Some are still defending our Nation, either as “lifers” or as defense or security personnel. Others may have turned to teaching, creativity, or volunteering, enriching other people’s lives in whatever way we can. (Ken has contributed this site, where we can share our thoughts and memories, and honor our fallen comrades.) Many of us have married or had relationships, raised children, or discovered things about ourselves we had not known before. All of us have given of ourselves, and continue to do so.

We must all, each of us, find our purpose in the world. In war, your purpose is clear: defeat the enemy and come back alive. Life off of the battlefield is not so simple. All of us must find our own way home. It is a long, hard road.

The Urban Dilemma

Cities, by definition, have more people than small towns; and larger cities have more people than smaller cities. And because the single population is a subset of the population as a whole, it follows that if you are single you will find a larger population of available singles in a big city than in a smaller one. (Barring the case where there's an extraordinary discrepancy in the proportion of singles, such that the absolute number of singles in a given smaller city is greater.)

So that's the obvious factor. Let's call that Equation A. But there's another factor too, I think - we'll call it Equation B - whereby those teeming hordes of urban singles KNOW that they are single, and that they live in the city, and that they have a seemingly endless array of potential partners to choose from. So, is the urban population choosier? More fickle? More jaded? To the extent that the urban single population is self-selected, is it because they're looking to find a serious relationship, or looking to avoid commitment?

And beyond Equations A and B, there's just the sensory overload of living in the city. Even if you live in New York and love every minute of it, you must know what I'm talking about. How does that impact our ability to form and maintain relationships?

And finally there are the reasons people live in cities, which may overlap with Equation A but are not identical with it. There is, specifically, the "safety in numbers" principle. If you are an ethnic minority, a political minority, an artist, intellectual, or queer (there's the overlap with A), you want to go where there are others of "your kind". It's sort of the general case of Equation A.

How do you balance all of these things - especially when your politics and your values are a weird mix of small-town (read "red state") and urban (read "coastal liberal")?

I don't know the answer. When I get it figured out, I'll let you know.

United 93: A Walk-On Part in the War

United 93 doesn't have a "plot" or "characters" in the conventional sense. Most of the characters are never named. Only one that I noticed - Ben Sliney - is ever identified by first and last name. Two we recognize - Mark Bingham and Todd Beamer - but most are simply there. They appear onscreen as people appear to us in life, without introduction or fanfare.

Many of the surviving characters are played by their real-life counterparts. Look at the cast list and the first thing you will notice, after the absence of "superstars", is the number of roles identified as "Himself/Herself". Many others are known only by their role titles, "Boston 5", "Herndon 1", "Cleveland Supervisor".

It is a cast of walk-ons - again, just as in life. And yet paradoxically, it's a movie about ordinary people who become actors: not "actors" in the sense of performers, but actors in the original sense - people who take action.

The movie does not try to "explain" September 11. It does not bother to fill you in on what everybody knows, because you already know it. It's very much like the classic horror device, where you (the viewer) know the danger awaiting the characters, but the characters themselves are blissfully ignorant. In other words, it is simply excruciating.

If you are vulnerable to motion sickness, you should be warned that the film employs a "nervous camera" style. A friend commented that this seemed overdone, in contrast to an actual "impromptu documentary" filmed by a live camera crew that happened to be on the scene on 9/11; the cameras in the real documentary were steadier.

But "United 93" is not a documentary, not even a "faux documentary". It is a movie made (necessarily, as all movies are) by people with cameras. It is not meant to simulate a fictional documentary made by fictional people with cameras; it's meant to put you in the middle of the action. So I believe the "nervous camera" is meant to invoke, not the unsteady hand of an anxious cameraman, but the restless gaze of the human eye.

I am one of Judith's "Venus people". I like relationship films. I cry in movies. (I even cry during "Xena".) I cried in "United 93" because it is a movie full of ending relationships. To say that there is "no happy ending" doesn't begin to tell it. There is not one tragedy but many: the sundering of romances we have not seen develop, the bereavement of families we've never met, the goodbyes to people we will never know. There is no redeeming moment at the end; no "boy gets girl"; no tender embrace amid the smouldering rubble, pregnant with the hope of life renewed. No. There is only the spinning ground and the silent blackness.

Did I give away the ending? But you already knew how it would end.

Journey to America

July 10, 2005 - With the music of Sixteen Horsepower blasting from the speakers of Michael's black Chrysler LeBaron, Michael Totten and your present writer took off early Friday morning to escape the comfy enclave of Portland, Oregon. Soon the firs changed to pines and we were out of Ecotopia and heading straight for the heart of the Empty Quarter. It was Michael's idea. Michael is a native of Oregon and a travel addict, and there are few places in the Northwest he hasn't seen; for this trip, he wanted to visit Pyramid Lake and The Playa in Nevada. I agreed to go along, not having a terribly clear idea of where these places were, but fairly sure that a trip out of town would be fun, and might do me some good. It was, and it did.

Cross the Cascades, and the land is drier, the climate harsher, the life unforgiving. But already I'm lapsing into cliches. I want to describe the land as "barren", but it's not entirely true, and anyway I don't think you can really understand the idea of "barrenness" unless you have actually worked on a farm, which I have not. So instead I will say that the land is bare. In lush areas like the Willamette Valley, you don't spend much time thinking about the land (again, unless you work the land yourself) because you never really see the land. What you see is the stuff that grows on the land - grass, trees, utility poles, roads, houses, office buildings. Out there, though, you see the land itself. You see dirt. You look down at the ground and there's dirt, sand, rock, or salt, with a smattering of low scrubby plants or spindly pine trees, and the occasional stretch of road, a few telephone poles, and maybe a couple of buildings here and there. Then you look up, and there's the Western sky, which is famously "not cloudy all day" - it's just sky and nothing but sky, not blanketed by couds or smog or trees or buildings. And sandwiched ridiculously in between, there's you.

We drove through south-central Oregon, one of the most sparsely populated regions of the lower 48. We passed through Lakeview, with its big wecome sign depicting a genial cowboy waving to newcomers. We passed a big body of water, Goose Lake, on our right. We cut through a conrner of California and passed into Nevada. You can tell immediately where the California highway ends and the Nevada road (using the term somewhat loosely) begins. And from there on it was nothing but sand and mountains until we got to Pyramid Lake.

I took a camera but somehow didn't feel moved to take many photographs. Michael did, and I'm sure he'll post these on his blog before long. I'm looking forward to seeing them myself. (Update: they're here.) We made Pyramid Lake by late afternoon. The lake is big, and lies entirely within a Paiute reservation - as Michael said, on of the few good pieces of land the Indians got. We hit the lodge at about 5pm, after ten or eleven hours driving, and went down to get a good look at the lake.

Pyramid Lake is said to be one of the most beautiful lakes in the Western Hemisphere, and baby, they ain't kidding. It's a magnificent turquoise blue, and surrounded by sand and mountains. There are no high-rise hotels or any of that crap. The lodge we stayed at adjoined a general store / saloon / casino, which serves as the area's cultural center. Over a can of Miller beer (to my chagrin, I'd made the mistake of asking the barmaid what they had "on tap"), Michael and I unwound after the trip. I ordered dinner, which consisted of a basket of onion rings.

Now I have to say a word or two about food in the West. Quite simply, there isn't any. That is, if you're spoiled on the kinds of food you can get in Portland or San Francisco or Seattle, there is no food in the West. Period. What you can get is deep fried everything, and hot dogs. That's it. Oh, and omelettes, if you're lucky. My entire diet for the whole trip was two cheese omelettes. (I counted myself fortunate because the second one - eaten in Gerlach, home of the Burning Man festival - actually contained vegetables.) The concept of a salad just does not exist.

But that's part of leaving Ecotopia. The food - or whatever they call that stuff - quite literally goes with the territory. As Michael explained it, people in the West don't see Nature as benign because it is not. It is something to be wrestled with, mastered when possible and accommodated when it cannot be mastered. Michael pointed to an area that some of the early settlers had attempted to irrigate in the hopes of growing crops. Not only had it not worked, he explained, the attempt had actually made the soil even worse, resulting in whole expanses of lifeless sand, devoid of even the local vegetation. Nowadays people take the more pragmatic approach of importing truckoads of canned and frozen foods from elsewhere. This is why you're gonna have a tough time finding that organic vegetarian burrito you're hankering for (or even a celery stick), and it's why you don't have to spend a whole lot of time looking for a recycling bin to dump that plastic pop bottle in when you're done with it. Why, after all, should man respect nature? Does nature respect man?

We sat for a while in the saloon as evening came on. Local men and women - heavyset, somehow cheerful and melancholy at the same time - laughed and gossiped and shot pool. I bought a few items at the store; the girl behind the counter, who was pretty and simply cheerful, wished me a pleasant evening. Someone turned on the jukebox and we endured a godawful song about "the drinkin' bone's connected to the party bone"; after that we heard a surprisingly compelling number, "Holy Water" by Big and Rich. I turned in at about 9:30; Michael stayed up a little later to work on a piece for Lebanon's Daily Star.

I was talking about the land. The mountains are stony, rugged, and refreshingly solid-looking (not like the ones around here, which will occasionally blow up on you). We drove by a number of lakes - a few, like Goose and Pyramid, actually had water in them. Most did not. There is a curious custom of charitably naming a dry lakebed "Lake So-and-so" when the "lake" has been a flat expanse of dirt for countless years. They're even labeled that way on the map: "Coleman Lake (dry)", "Alkali Lake (dry)". And when I said dirt, I really meant dirt and salt; in some places the ground is literally white. It's the most amazing, humbling thing to see.

And this brings us to the Playa. We left the lodge at Pyramid Lake early to get there. I thought Michael was crazy for wanting to go at all, but I'm glad we did. Playa means beach in Spanish, and a beach implies sand, which the Playa certainly has. A conventional definition of "beach" generally involves the presence of an ocean as well, and thus implies water; this element, once again, is absent from the Playa. But it wasn't always so: in prehistoric times, that whole region used to be underwater, a huge inland sea; so the name (like the names of the waterless "lakes") is not entirely a misnomer.

The Playa is a huge expanse of dry sand and mud. In the hot summer months, it's dangerous to drive across because the temperature can get to over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In the cool winter months, it's dangerous to drive across because the sand is wet an your car can get stuck. We were lucky: we got there when the temperature was mild and the ground was mostly dry. Still, we didn't venture out too far; I had vivid memories of my armored vehicle getting stuck in Saudi sabkhas "back in the day", and Michael's LeBaron didn't have a winch cable or recovery vehicle handy.

So there we were: the geographical center of nowhere. There is something therapeutic about just going out into the wasteland for a while. We got out of the car, and, without a word, wandered slowly away in separate directions, and simply stayed there for about an hour - standing, sitting, just letting the noise and chatter drain away. I did a quiet breath meditation for about 20 minutes. We took turns looking through the binoculars, noticing how the mountains seemed to float above their mirror image on the horizon.

This was a trip to the part of America we rarely get to see from where we live. It was a chance to purge some of the accumulated mental chatter and garbage, and to remind ourselves just how small we are and how big the world is. Standing on the caked clay of the Playa, surrounded by the mountains and the invisible coastline of what had once been a sea, we were probably as close to standing on Mars as either one of us will get. Eventually some clouds did start moving in from the west. Over the peak of one of the mountains, one of those strange, flying-saucer-shaped clouds hovered and then dissipated. It is at moments like these that you truly feel like an alien on your own planet.

Yet little more than a hundred years ago, that trip itself would have been science fiction. To drive a horseless motorcar, traveling a mile a minute, into the middle of a desert that even the Indians dreaded? And to do it as easily as we listen to recorded music out of a box, or write for a newspaper on the other side of the globe. And then there's Nevada itself: the land where our own Government tested atomic weapons, turning whole stretches of the desert into glass.

I've written elsewhere about the role of the wilderness in American spirituality. It is one thing to read about these things in books, and quite another to experience them for yourself. Michael's choice of Sixteen Horsepower for the ride was a good one, because their lonely and unforgiving sound perfectly captures the spirit of the landscape. Outside of the car, though, the only music is silence.

Why should man respect nature, if nature does not respect man? Because we have no choice. Nature is big, the wilderness is big, the world is big, and we are small. In such a world, it is very difficult to believe in a Sunday-school deity, some guy named "God" with a long white beard and a bag of gifts for good girls and boys. G-d is not a man, and if we expect human qualities from the Spirit we will only be disappointed.

On a hot July day more than 250 years ago, a Connecticut preacher used these memorable words:

"There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty, any more than if nothing else but God's mere will had in the least degree, or in any respect whatsoever, any hand in the preservation of wicked men one moment. ...

Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell.

The very fabric of our world is held together by forces hanging in the most minute balance. The strong nuclear force is, to within a miniscule fraction, exactly enough to keep the protons in the nucleus of an atom from flying apart, repelled by their neighbors' electric charge. Were this balance to falter for even an instant, we would be annihilated in a flash. Humankind, having discovered the secret to upsetting this balance, now possesses this frightening power. With each generation, the consequences of our successes and our failures, our virtues and our sins, become greater. And the wilderness is still there, no less hostile. It gives us room to wander, room to get lost, and abundant room to die. So we are tempted to treat the wilderness as harshly as it treats us.

But if, as Jonathan Edwards believed, we are all in imminent danger of destruction, then our exile in the wilderness also gives us the liberty to find the spiritual materials of our own salvation. We must do this for ourselves; it will not be handed to us. Every one of us, from the moment we're thrust screaming into this world until the moment we're taken from it, faces this same exile. And every one of us faces the same task.

Why should man respect nature, if nature will not respect man? Ask instead how humankind may best show respect for the Power that lies beyond nature, and that lies inside each of us as well. Ask how to act in the face of the undisguised Nothingness, from which everything emerges and to which everything will one day be driven home. Nature makes no choices and asks no questions. Nature cares nothing for man because it is only the veil before the Void. Humans alone have the power to seek the presence of that nameless Source, to walk in its ways, and to honor it.

We got home at about 11:30 last night. I'm not gonna lie to you, it was good to be back in the land of fresh salads, micro-brews, Starbucks, and Powell's Books. Back in the rich and civilized climate of Portland, it feels like another world altogether. We can get the best clothes, the best books, the best food, and the best coffee. We have safe streets, comfortable weather, a pleasant city park, and a respectable college. We have all of the best things in life.

And we're living on top of a volcano.